(4) Tue Oct 11 2005 07:58 PSTFun With Amazon Wish Lists I.V:
I should talk about the target audience for this series before more authors of online bookshelf programs leave comments in my entries. This series is not for bibliophiles per se; rather for bibliophiles who want a programmable API to their bibliophilia.

If you only want to make an annotated list of all your books then use LibraryThing. It's fast, easy to use, and the data is reliable. You can simulate multiple discrete lists by using tags. It costs $10, which is not much compared to other things you've paid for. You could also use All Consuming, which is free and does non-books, but was really slow when I tried to use it (which was a long time ago). You could also use one of the 200 bookshelf applications sure to show up on Ning. You could buy Delicious Library for your Mac, which uses a webcam as a barcode scanner. You could, in short, use whatever incarnation of this particular project tickles your fancy, because your fancy is not tickled by external APIs.

If you want to build a list of books and then use it as a data structure, then Amazon wish lists are the only game in town operating on a higher level than a Z39.50 binding: see for instance this NYCB from last year, before I got REST religion. Amazon provides some interesting data not available through other APIs, like prices and sales rank, but you can join on ISBN to get that data, so a lot of the things in the series will be applicable to people with Tyrannioware or other Z39.50 systems.

(4) Tue Oct 11 2005 09:16 PSTOverworked:
How many "business hours" would you say are in a "business day"? I would say eight. But someone told me they would call me back in 24-48 business hours, which makes it sound like every hour in a business day is a business hour.

(3) Tue Oct 11 2005 13:57 PST:
Today Kevin told me that the noble gases can be coerced into forming compounds, mainly with fluorine. When this was discovered (1960s), Kevin's father wrote a paper on the subject called "How the Noble have Fallen". Just recently the noble gases have been bound to uranium. Stay tuned for action as the noble gases form compounds with more and more other elements!

As we know, Japanese robot technology is making great advances. Once a gigantic humanized robot was only an imaginary object, but it will be made in the future. We wonder whether it is in demand or not.

That reminds me, I need to finish the postmodern Godzilla fanfic I was going to serialize a million years ago... aw, who am I fooling?